


tethered

by kittenscully



Series: fictober 2020 [17]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Light Angst, Post-Episode: s04e06 Sanguinarium, Season/Series 04, Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27068983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittenscully/pseuds/kittenscully
Summary: He no longer waits to be asked in, presuming an open invitation. In turn, Scully no longer knows how to relax in his presence, wound up piano-string tight.[fictober day 17]
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Series: fictober 2020 [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1949467
Comments: 3
Kudos: 52





	tethered

**Author's Note:**

  * For [iconicscullyoutfits](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iconicscullyoutfits/gifts).



> Prompt: "Not interested, thank you."

Night has found them too near to each other for comfort. 

In her apartment, Mulder is long-boned, careless, magnetic. He lacks intrusivity, but fills up a space as naturally as water, sprawling across her couch. Behind her neck, his forearm lays atop the cushions, and it is impossible to relax without touching him. 

He no longer waits to be asked in, presuming an open invitation. In turn, Scully no longer knows how to relax in his presence, wound up piano-string tight. 

Physically speaking, she remembers, fear is desperately close to arousal. 

“Who would’ve thought,” he’s saying, shaking his head. “Protective witchcraft.”

“We don’t have any evidence of that,” she replies automatically, barely aware of herself saying it. 

All her life, Scully’s prided herself on restraint, on holding herself together. But he is radiating warmth, humming with pent up energy, and she is dizzy from his weight of his cologne even when she breathes through her mouth.

“Oh, c’mon, Scully.” He scoffs. “How else do you explain that nurse’s behavior?”

She turns to look at him, and keeps her gaze on the split-stone line of his jaw for several moments too long. 

“Mental instability,” she says. “Delusion. Cult influence. A savior complex. Schizophrenia. Too many horror movies.”

Beneath his cheekbone, the shadow of stubble catches her eye. He would chafe her fingers, if she touched him there, sandpaper on her palms. She shifts, her throat dry, self-control wearing steadily down to the bone. 

“Do you want me to go down that list and dispute every point?”

“No, not particularly.”

“I have arguments,” he tells her, leaning in closer, close enough that she can feel his breath on her lips. “Good ones.”

There’s a pause, and she stretches it out as long as she can, slow and luxurious, muscle and sinew. His eyes, dark in the dim light, his collar popped open. Christ, when had he shed his tie? 

“Not interested, thank you,” she breathes, finally. 

He gives her a knowing smirk, and lets the distance between them swell again. 

Scully has seen him make a fool of himself too many times to count, earnest and gangly as a teenager. But now, lounged back against her pillows, he is every bit the predator. 

She wets her lips with her tongue, viscerally aware of him watching her. There is something very wrong, most likely, with seeing the same person as so many things. A twin, a temptation, a brother in arms, the wolf to her moonstruck doe. There is something even more wrong, she suspects, with wanting to keep it that way. 

Being hunted should not render her so deliciously alive. 

But she is tethered to him, in every way, by blood and by choice. And as she’d told him not too long ago, she wouldn’t change a day.

“Well, I’m sure you can’t explain the medical instruments that appeared in that poor woman’s stomach,” he points out after a moment. “Unless you want to claim that she swallowed them.”

“She could’ve been force-fed.” 

“You know that’s bullshit.”

Scully shrugs, purposely contrary. Getting a rise out of him might make him lean in again, invade her space like he means it. 

“You said it yourself,” he insists calmly. Behind her head, his forearm rolls closer. “There’s no way she could’ve swallowed medical instruments and survived long enough for us to find them inside her.”

Mulder is so close to touching her, in so many places, that her skin crackles uniformly with static. His leg resting inches from hers, his arm hovering just above her shoulders. 

It’s hard to tell when tides began to turn between them. He had been catnip, then an IV drip, and then too important to risk. He had been her partner, her long-distance flirtation, and then her best friend. 

She had learned to moderate, to meditate, observing the surge of her own wanting like a river outside of her body. She had practiced restraint and repression, saintlike under her own watchful gaze. She had learned to keep the distance, to keep her hands to herself. She had stopped touching herself to thoughts of him, and then, she had stopped touching herself altogether. She had become his perfect complement, and relied upon his company to go on. She had become a bride to her own solitude, a nun to the martyr he made of himself. She had cut away every part of herself that did not suit his tastes, and placed herself on a pedestal for his approval. 

The mistake, she thinks, was that she had not learned how to be without him, or how to be with anyone else since meeting him. And now, she cannot distinguish between rage and desire, between pain and arousal. Between partner and lover. 

There is danger here, fringing their every interaction, and one day, they will go too far. 

“I’m sure there’s a reasonable scientific explanation,” Scully says finally. 

“Don’t Catholics believe in witchcraft?”

“Catholics believe in lots of things,” she sighs. “And in case you haven’t noticed, I don’t exactly go to church on Sundays these days.” 

There’s a nondescript grunt in response, and it bothers her, how comfortable he seems. He must feel this tension, just as she does. 

Women, she knows, are trained to keep an iron grip on the reins of their appetite. Even the men who’ve wanted her have not wanted her to want them back. Instead, they’ve wanted her spread-eagled and indulgent or virginal and protesting, suited to their pleasures and not her own either way. 

For all her practice, though, still the leather slides in her grasp, and still, the desire gets away from her. She’s never been satisfied with merely being the object of someone else’s fantasies. 

So she eyes the buttons of Mulder’s shirt and _wants_ , selfishly, to rile him up. 

When she looks back to his face, she finds him staring at her, jaw knocked loose on its hinges. The crouched, animal hunger is evident in his gaze, a natural response to her own, and the feeling of balance, of shared need, is revolutionary, transcendent. 

Her body responds before she can think it through, chest drawing her towards him as surely as if a wire connected her sternum to his. 

“‘S there beer in your fridge?” he asks suddenly, rising to his feet and turning his back to her as if he can’t get away fast enough. 

The rearranging of gravity in his absence leaves her momentarily stunned, almost ashamed. 

“Get me one too,” she calls over her shoulder, flushing at the roughness of her own voice.

As she watches, Mulder keeps his body carefully angled away, walking like a man with something sizable to hide, and the premature embarrassment fades more quickly than it had appeared. 

It takes every bit of her determination not to rise and follow him, and every bit of her remaining restraint not to hope that he’ll return empty handed and quench himself on her instead.

When he seats himself beside her again, it’s with two open beers. She doesn’t let her eyes travel below his belt, renewing her grip on the reins. 

“To good witches,” he pronounces, knocking his bottle against hers. 

She rolls her eyes, and gathers herself in, all too aware of the boundaries she has to keep. 

Fear is desperately close to arousal. The dilation of her pupils, the sweating of her palms, the pounding of her heart. 

She is not afraid of him, not now, not ever. But she is afraid of what she might do, in a moment of weakness, afraid of the meeting place between desire and the deep, unsubsiding care she’s tended for him. 

And she is afraid that without him, there will be nothing left of her worth keeping. 

**Author's Note:**

> In addition to the dialogue prompt, this was written in response to a prompt from iconicscullyoutfits for simmering tension in early s4. It's also influenced at least in part by her writing, so it only seemed right to dedicate it to her.


End file.
